A/N: A couple old LJ drabbles I found on my laptop and I thought I'd post here for posterity's sake.

- Smoke -

Smoke trailed lazily from the cigarette in his hand, snaked its way up the ceiling and along the walls and disappeared into the air. It was beautiful, and it wasn't.

He held it out to her, and she took it for no reason, rolled it over in her fingers. She'd never taken it before, never had the impulse.

Slowly, she raised it to her lips, and she inhaled. She'd never done that before either.

She coughed. It tasted bitter and gross and not quite familiar in her mouth, and when she exhaled she smelled the smoke, and she felt light-headed. Everything smelled like smoke. Everything tasted like smoke and cigarettes, and it tasted like him and like her and like the air and like everything she wasn't.

He took the cigarette back, and she could hear it crackle as he puffed.

She swallowed, craving it back. She could taste it on her lips, and it was wrong, but she didn't care. She wanted it back, even as he flicked it away and it disappeared into the mass of rugs and dust. She looked for it where it landed, but she didn't find it.

"Surprised you took it," he said.

She looked at him, and she knew he'd watched her watch the cigarette, but she said nothing, her gaze slipping back down to center on nothing in particular.

"I can light another if you want," he continued, lifting the pack to waggle it in front of her face.

"No," she said. And she didn't. This time she turned to eliminate him fully from her sight, even though she could feel him against her side, the weird not-quite-room temperature of his skin. She could taste the cigarette on her lips, and she could taste him, or maybe she just remembered him somewhere knotted and rolling behind her teeth.

Somewhere, floating just below the surface, some part of her knew she should go, that she shouldn't be here, that the taste was wrong, that he was wrong, that everything was wrong, but she didn't care. She wouldn't leave, didn't want to go, because there was something half like belonging there on the floor, tangled up in all the bedding.

He touched her with two fingers, feather-light down her jaw, and she shivered. Down her face, down her neck. Down, down, down. So soft it was frightening.

She turned back to him, and she found him leaning over her, propped on an elbow. He smelled like booze and dirt and cigarettes, like the mouthwash he might've used two or three seconds before she got there, and she didn't know what she felt as he stared at her, and as he stared through her. She didn't know what he felt, though maybe she could've guessed, and maybe it might've scared her if she did.

She took his hand and pulled it off her, held it there in the inches between them. A question dissolved before she could voice it, so she fiddled with one of his rings instead, asked him a different one, "How do you smoke if you don't have to breathe?"

He grinned at her, twitched his fingers in her grip. "Same reason I eat chicken wings and Weetabix, luv. 'Have to's got nothing to do with it."

She dropped his hand and rolled onto her back, because it irritated her, something about the answer or maybe it was just something in his face. That weird bond of theirs since she'd died the second time, growing less and less between the lines, breaching the surface.

And as she laid there he reached in the box and pulled out another cigarette, grabbed the old Bic from under a blanket and lit it up, tossed the box away. It landed on a pile of rumpled clothes. Theirs, all mixed together.

For a second she watched him smoke, the lazy way he dropped his hand, watched the smoke puff from his nose and the butt of the stick, roll up to the ceiling.

She watched until she couldn't do it anymore, and she closed her eyes.